Fortune's Favorites (87 page)

He hadn't wanted Afranius or Petreius with him, couldn't even bear the thought of the younger ones, especially Aulus Gabinius. But now he beckoned to Afranius and Petreius to ride up to him, and when they had ranged themselves one on either side of his Public Horse, he pointed with a stick at the scene in the distance. Not one word did his senior legates say, just waited dumbly to be told what Pompey wanted to do next.

“See where Sertorius is?” Pompey asked, but rhetorically only; he didn't expect a reply. “He's busy along the walls, I think sapping them. His camp is right there. He's come down from his hill, I see! He doesn't really want it, he's interested in taking the town. But I won't fall for that trick again!” This was said through clenched teeth. “The distance we have to march before we engage him is about a mile, and the length of his line is about half that-he's spread awfully thin, which is to our advantage. If he's to stand any chance at all he'll have to tighten up when he sees us coming-and we have to presume that he thinks he stands a chance, or he wouldn't be there. He can scatter either west or east, or in both directions at once. I imagine he'll go both ways-I would.” That popped out; Pompey reddened, but went on smoothly. “We'll advance on him with our wings projecting ahead of our center, cavalry distributed equally between them on their tips, infantry-one legion to each wing-forming the densest part of the wings closest to the center, where I'll put my other four legions. When an army is approaching across flat ground it's hard to tell how far ahead of the center the wings are, and we'll extend them further forward the closer we get. If he holds me light-and he seems to hold me light!-he won't believe me capable of military guile. Until my wings enfold him on both sides and prevent his escaping to either the west or the east. We'll roll him up against the walls, which leaves him nowhere to go.”

Afranius ventured a remark. “It will work,” he said.

Petreius nodded. “It will work,” he said.

That was all the confirmation Pompey needed. At the foot of his vantage point he had the buglers blow “form ranks and fall into line,” and left Afranius and Petreius to issue his orders to the other legates and the leading centurions. Himself he busied in summoning six mounted heralds.

Thus it was that by the time Afranius and Petreius returned to him it was too late and too public to dissuade him from what he had done; appalled, Afranius and Petreius watched the heralds ride away, hoping desperately that for Pompey's sake Pompey's new maneuver worked.

While the army moved out, the heralds under a flag of truce rode right up to the outer defenses of Sertorius's camp. There they brayed their message to the inhabitants of Lauro standing on top of Lauro's walls.

“Come out, all you people of Lauro!” they bellowed. “Come out! Line your battlements and watch while Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus teaches this renegade wolfshead who calls himself a Roman what being a true Roman is! Come out and watch Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus inflict absolute defeat upon Quintus Sertorius!”

It was going to work! thought Pompey, smarting enough to ride once again in the forefront of his army. His wings extended further and further forward as the legions advanced, and still Sertorius made no move to order his men to flee east and west. They would be enclosed! Sertorius and all his soldiers would die, die, die! Oh, Sertorius would learn in the most painful and final way what it was like to anger Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!

The six thousand men Sertorius had held in reserve completely hidden from Pompey's scouts as well as from Pompey's high vantage point had fallen on Pompey's unprotected rear and were tearing it into pieces before Pompey in the vanguard even knew. When he was apprised of it, there was nothing he could do to avert disaster. His wings were now so far forward that he was powerless to reverse their thrust, and they had turned inward, were busy engaging Sertorius's men under Lauro's walls-their battlements now black with observers of the debacle, thanks to Pompey's heralds. When attempt after attempt to wheel failed, the most Pompey and his legates could do was to struggle frantically to form the four legions of the center into square. To make matters worse, squadrons of Sertorian cavalry were riding into view from behind Lauro and falling upon Pompey's horse from the rear of his wing tips. Disaster piled upon disaster.

But they were good men and ably served by good centurions, those veteran Roman legions Pompey led; they fought back bravely, though their mouths gaped from lack of water and a terrible dismay had filled their hearts because someone had outgeneraled their lovely young man, and they hadn't thought there was anyone alive could do that. So Pompey and his legates managed in the end to form their square, and somehow even to pitch a camp.

At dusk Sertorius drew off, left them to finish the camp amid mountainous heaps of dead. And amid jeers and boos which now came not only from Sertorius's soldiers, but also from the citizens of Lauro. Pompey couldn't even escape to weep in private, found himself too mortified to throw his scarlet general's cape over his head and weep beneath its cover. Instead he forced himself to move here and there with smiles and encouraging words, cheering the parched men up, trying to think where he might find water, unable to think how he might extricate himself from shame.

In the first light of dawn he sent to Sertorius and asked for time to dispose of his dead. His request was granted with sufficient generosity to enable him to shift his camp clear of the reeking field, and to a site well provided with potable water. But then a black depression descended upon him and he left it to his legates to count and bury the dead in deep pits and trenches; there was no timber nearby for burning, no oil either. As they toiled he withdrew to his command tent while his uninjured men-terribly, terribly few-constructed a stout camp around him to keep Sertorius at bay after the armistice was ended. Not until sunset, the battle now a day into the past, did Afranius venture to seek an audience. He came alone.

“It will be the nundinae before we're finished with the burial details,” said the senior legate in a matter-of-fact voice.

The general spoke, equally matter-of-fact. “How many dead are there, Afranius?”

“Ten thousand foot, seven hundred horse.”

“Wounded?”

“Five thousand fairly seriously, almost everybody else with cuts or bruises or scratches. Those troopers who lived are all right, but they're short of mounts. Sertorius preferred to kill their horses.”

“That means I'm down to four legions of foot-one legion of which is seriously wounded-and eight hundred troopers who cannot all be provided with horses.”

“Yes.”

“He whipped me like a cur.”

Afranius said nothing, only looked at the leather wall of the tent with expressionless eyes.

“He's Gaius Marius's cousin, isn't he?”

“That's right.”

“I suppose that accounts for it.”

“I suppose it does.”

Nothing more was said for quite a long time. Pompey broke the silence. “How can I explain this to the Senate?” It came out half whisper, half whimper.

Afranius transferred his gaze from the tent wall to his commander's face, and saw a man a hundred years old. His heart smote him, for he genuinely did love Pompey, as friend and overlord. Yet what alarmed him more than his natural grief for friend and overlord was his sudden conviction that if Pompey was not shored up, not given back his confidence and his inborn arrogance, the rest of him would waste away and die. This grey-faced old man was someone Afranius had never met.

So Afranius said, “If I were you, I'd blame it on Metellus Pius. Say he refused to come out of his province to reinforce you. I'd triple the number of men in Sertorius's army too.”

Pompey reared back in horror. “No, Afranius! No! I could not possibly do that!”

“Why?” asked Afranius, amazed; a Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in the throes of moral or ethical dilemmas was an utter unknown.

“Because,” said Pompey in a patient voice, “I am going to need Metellus Pius if I am to salvage anything out of this Spanish commission. I have lost nearly a third of my forces, and I cannot ask the Senate for more until I can claim at least one victory. Also because it is possible someone who lives in Lauro will escape to Rome. His story will have credence when he tells it. And because, though I am not a sage, I do believe that truth will out at exactly the worst moment.”

“Oh, I understand!” cried Afranius, enormously relieved; Pompey was not experiencing moral or ethical scruples, he was just seeing the facts as the facts were. “Then you already know what you have to explain to the Senate,” he added, puzzled.

“Yes, yes, I know!” snapped Pompey, goaded. “I simply don't know how to explain it! In words, I mean! Varro isn't here, and who else is there with the right words?”

“I think,” said Afranius delicately, “that your own words are probably the right words for news like this. The connoisseurs of literature in the Senate will just assume that you've chosen a plain style for the plain truth-that's how their minds work, if you ask me. As for the rest of them-they're not connoisseurs, so they won't see anything wrong with your words anyway.”

This splendidly logical and pragmatic analysis went far toward cheering Pompey up, superficially at least. The deeper and more cruelly lacerated layers, incorporating as they did pride, dignitas, confidence, and many complicated images of self, would be slow to mend; some layers would mend maimed, some layers would perhaps not mend at all.

Thus Pompey sat down to begin his report to the Senate with his nostrils assailed by the perpetual stench of rotting flesh, and did not spare himself even by omitting his rashness in sending heralds to cry to the citizens of Lauro, let alone his mistaken tactics on the battlefield itself. He then sent the draft, written with a stylus upon wax smeared and gouged by many erasures, to his secretary, who would copy it in fair script (with no spelling or grammatical errors) in ink upon paper. Not that he finished the missive; Lauro wasn't finished.

Sixteen days went by. Sertorius continued his investment of Lauro while Pompey did not move out of his camp. That this inertia could not last Pompey was well aware; he was rapidly running out of food, and his mules and horses were growing thinner almost as one looked at them. Yet he couldn't retreat-not with Lauro under siege and Sertorius doing exactly as he liked. He had no choice but to forage. Upon pain of threatened torture his scouts swore to him that the fields to the north were entirely free of Sertorian patrols, so he ordered a large and well-armed expedition of cavalry to forage in the direction of Saguntum.

The men had not been gone for two hours when a frantic message for help came: Sertorius's men were swarming everywhere, picking off the troopers one by one. Pompey sent a full legion to the rescue, then spent the next hours pacing up and down the ramparts of his camp looking anxiously northward.

Sertorius's heralds gave him the verdict at sunset.

“Go home, kid! Go back to Picenum, kid! You're fighting real men now! You're an amateur! How does it feel to run up against a professional? Want to know where your foraging party is, kid? Dead, kid! Every last one of them! But you needn't worry about burying them this time, kid! Quintus Sertorius will bury them for you, free of charge! He's got their arms and armor in payment for the service, kid! Go home! Go home!”

It had to be a nightmare. It could not truly be happening! Where had the Sertorian forces come from when none of those who had fought on the battlefield, even the hidden cavalry, had moved from the siegeworks before Lauro?

“These were not his legionaries or his regular cavalry, Gnaeus Pompeius,” said the chief scout, shivering in dread. “These were his guerrillas. They come out of nowhere, they ambush, they kill, they vanish again.”

Thoroughly disenchanted with his Spanish scouts, Pompey had all of them executed and vowed that in future he would use his own Picentines as scouts; better to use men he trusted who didn't know the countryside than men he couldn't trust even if they did know the countryside. That was the first lesson of warfare in Spain he had really absorbed, though it was not to be the last. For he was not going home to Picenum! He was going to stay in Spain and have it out with Sertorius if he died in the effort! He would fight fire with fire, stone with stone, ice with ice. No matter how many blunders he made, no matter how many times that brilliant personification of anti-Roman evil might run tactical rings around him, he would not give up. Sixteen thousand of his soldiers were dead and almost all his cavalry. But he would not give up until the last man and the last horse were dead.

The Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus who retreated slowly from Lauro at the end of Sextilis with the screams of the dying city echoing in his ears was a very different one from the man who had strutted south in the spring so full of his own importance, so confident, so careless. The new Gnaeus Pompeius could even listen with a look of alert interest on his face to the stentorian voices of the Sertorian heralds who dogged his footsteps detailing to his soldiers the hideous fate in store for the women of Lauro when they reached their new owners in far-western Lusitania. No other Sertorian personnel even bothered about his footsteps as he hastened north past Saguntum, past Sebelaci, past Intibili, across the Iberus. In less than thirty days Pompey brought his exhausted, half-starved men into their winter camp at Emporiae, and moved no more that awful year. Especially after he heard that Metellus Pius had won the only battle he had been called upon to fight-and won it brilliantly.

It was after Metellus Pius had seen Balbus Senior and read Memmius's letter that he began to think about how he might extricate Memmius from his incarceration in New Carthage. There had been changes in the man Sertorius dismissed as an old woman too, changes wrought by the crushing blow to his pride the Senate had dealt him in bestowing an equal imperium upon Kid Butcher, of all people. Perhaps nothing less than this monumental insult could have stripped away sufficient layers of the Piglet's defensive armor to allow the metal inside to show, for the Piglet had been cursed-or blessed-with an autocratic father of superb courage, incredible haughtiness and a stubbornness that had sometimes amounted to intellectual imbecility. Metellus Numidicus had been cheated of his war against Jugurtha by Gaius Marius, cheated time and time again-or so he had seen it-by that same New Man. And in turn cheated his son of anything more than a reputation for filial devotion in piously striving to have his hugely admired father recalled from an exile inflicted by Gaius Marius. Then just when the son might have congratulated himself that he stood highest in Sulla's estimation, along came the twenty-two-year-old Pompey with a bigger and better army to offer.